But even hard-core Chávistas aren’t convinced. “How much further can we sink?” says Alicia Torres, a 53-year-old housewife in Caracas who voted for Maduro in special elections last year and now regrets her decision. “I spend hours in line each day, waiting for products to arrive. Maduro is killing the country with his ineptitude.”

"It wasn't so hard two years ago," said Geraldine, citing the cost of a refrigerator that has risen to 22,000 bolivars from 1,700. "This all happened because Chavez died. He left us a president who doesn't know anything. Chavez knew how to get things done."

Annual inflation reached 60.9 percent in May, the fastest in the world, while gross domestic product probably shrank 2.1 percent in the second quarter, according to the median of economist forecasts compiled by Bloomberg.

>>Cutting imports, though, has resulted in growing shortages of basic foodstuffs, including coffee, milk, and corn meal, as well as medicines, spare parts, toilet tissue...

Toilet paper. They can't even make enough of their own toilet paper so they have to import it, no shitting (enjoy the pun). My friend is Venezuelan , and she tells me that the toilet paper shortage is the first thing that her relative harp upon when they call her. I love it.

The Caracas polling company Datanalisis found that one in 10 citizens—most of them middle- and upper-class Venezuelans between 18 and 35—are seeking to leave the country, more than double the number who sought to abandon it in 2002, which was marked by an unsuccessful coup attempt against then President Hugo Chavez and a paralyzing oil strike.

Travel agents are swamped with requests but turn customers away because there are no tickets to sell. Some travelers are left taking the bus, with trips to Lima, Peru, a five-day journey, now packed with middle-class Venezuelans who used to fly.

Many Venezuelans who want to leave the country simply can't. Tickets for short flights to other transit hubs in the region, such as Panama City or Bogotá, are difficult to come by.

....

Plus hyperinflation and a coming bond default, of course. Ah, the wonders of socialism!

I have a friend, an American, who travels frequently to South America (but not Venezuela, of course). He told me this, "Brazil is the new Argentina, Argentina is the new Venezuela, and Venezuela is the new Zimbabwe." Sad, isn't it?

Smart political leftists who play into the class warfare for ideological reasons or to rise upward need to realize that they are what's for dinner. When the mob comes for the rich and middle classes, it won't matter that they were on the left.

"It is becoming harder for the more productive and skilled Venezuelans to flee."

The problem is people flee the left-ruined economies of the world and then vote left as soon as they arrive in their new destination, perpetuating the cycle. Just as blue-states flee to red states for jobs and get to work flipping the state blue.

Venezuela's predicament is very much like Chile's under Allende, but I don't hold out any hope that a Pinochet-like figure will emerge to rescue Venezuela. Even if there was such an individual, the current occupant of our White House would probably do all he could to undermine him.

Jim, When a society is advanced enough and homogeneous enough, democracy does work, and it works extremely well. For example, even Switzerland, which is an odd combination of French, German and Italian ethnic groups that actually speak their own languages at home, still has a certain homogeneous political culture that is reinforced by their talents, and it has an extremely successful democracy that also happens to have (and forgive the obscene-sounding word) leftist features. The Scandinavian countries also have very successful economies despite their leftist attitudes, precisely because their mental horsepower and cultural homogeneity is adequate. You might still argue that the current immigration trends in the Scandinavian countries will make them like Venezuela in the future, but as long as the people residing in any country are competent enough, democracy does work.

Here is the unemployment chart of the Swiss democracy, which has no raw materials.

We don't even HAVE Democracy in the U.S. All our institutions have been subverted or taken over by Elites who are the children of Elites who were themselves the children of Elites. These people have great sympathy for the dysfunctional lower-classes and will do whatever they can to destroy the middle-class in order to make themselves feel better. This disconnected-from-reality Elite is the number one problem the U.S. has.

Jim - Obama is one of the elite. His grandparents were financially well off and he was provided access to elite schools at every level. That's not to say he is as elite as his daughters will be, but it doesn't take that long to move into the elite, witness Chelsea Clinton. Once they get you separated into separate schools and those Lefty professors get ahold of you, it is all over.

Jim - Obama is one of the elite. His grandparents were financially well off and he was provided access to elite schools at every level. That's not to say he is as elite as his daughters will be, but it doesn't take that long to move into the elite, witness Chelsea Clinton. Once they get you separated into separate schools and those Lefty professors get ahold of you, it is all over.

Let's look at the non-elites among our presidents for the last 80 years: Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. Truman's presidency was an accident, as was Johnson's. So was Ford's and you could even argue that were it not for Nixon, Carter would have had no realistic shot at the presidency, so count that one as an accident too. I don't count Clinton as non-elite, because he attended Yale and was a Rhodes scholar, so he'd already been given the nod, so to speak, for a higher station in life.

So that leaves Reagan, who the elites and his own party's establishment hated. The non-elites rarely get their chance, absent an assassination or other calamity.

All this suggests that the two parties' nominees in 2016 will be: Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.

Randall, the USA is not doing so well with capitalism. Besides there is no socialism in Venezuela really and you know it. I'm assuming you know the meaning of the word socialism while most Americans don't, just as they don't know about the atrocities perpetrated by Pinochet in Chile, nor how Allende was democratically elected.

All in all, Venezuelans seem happier with Maduro than we have been with any of our last two presidents. Maduro has a greater acceptance rate than Bush and Obama put together, and he was voted president democratically. Chavez was the president with the greatest acceptance rate of all the Americas. Latin America has been leaning socialist for decades, so how is that surprising or new? The problem is that Maduro just like Chavez refused to play ball with our silly rules.

By the way, we could also quote some other countries that really are socialist and are also doing better than us as we speak. We can also talk about capitalist or right-winged countries doing like crap, but I think you already know that. Let's be fair Randall.

Many progressives came to power in Latin America together with the debacle of national rights, which were then stunned by a great failure, which is connected to the failure of neoliberalism, and failed to adequately respond immediately. There's a change of seasons and they are profound changes with a major shift of power relations in countries like Ecuador for example. It is a change from a bourgeois to a popular state. This change in Latin America has been consolidated through the governments of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Lula da Silva in Brazil, Morales in Bolivia, Bachelet in Chile, Tavares Vasquez in Uruguay, and Correa in Ecuador.